


an unfinishable story

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Anal Fingering, Dirty Talk, First Kiss, First Time, Fix-It, Hand Jobs, M/M, Post-Series, Praise Kink, Reconciliation, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 04:19:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11524425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: Inside the river there is anunfinishable storyand you are somewhere in itand it will never end until all ends.– Mary OliverThe one where they meet again and have sex on the Cliffs of Existential Regrets™.





	an unfinishable story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ElDiablito_SF](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/gifts).



> Happy birthday a week late, Nemesis! You are the absolute best, a gift to this fandom and to my life. <3 I really hope you like this!

“Tell me a lie,” Flint says, and—

(“Tell me a lie,” Flint said. The hill. The swords. The sun. The waves throwing themselves against the cliff. The sky brimming above them like an ocean. The sticky, sweaty-palmed yearning to cling onto this. To hold onto everything about this moment with both hands, even his drenched shirt lapping like a lazy animal’s tongue on his back.

Because there was Flint, standing with sword-hand relaxed. There was Flint, giant-like as Flint always was, with those broad shoulders and thick thighs. And Nassau was far, far away, somewhere Silver could not see, even if he squinted and tried very hard to imagine it as a smudge on the horizon.

He could stay right there, and he would be safe. He would be safe, no matter how many times Flint’s sword found its way to his throat. And it would, it would. Over and over. But each time the blade would just shy from his skin, never kissing him, never biting. Flint’s sword would be at his neck, an infinite number of times, and he would be safe. Again, again.

He could stay right there, just beyond the lethal edge of Flint’s sword forever.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“About your past,” Flint clarified, and Silver frowned, a black shivering wind blowing through the hollow gaps between his ribs.

“I thought we’d discussed this,” Silver said.

“Yes,” Flint said, turning his sword idly so that it flashed in the light. “We’ve established that all you’ve ever told me about your past is fabrication. So. Tell me another lie.”

Silver didn’t know what it was that made him say what he said next. Flint’s eyes, perhaps, their endless, drowning sea; how Silver could never look away from them. _”You’re still watching my eyes, which is a good way of getting yourself killed”._ But it was of no concern to Silver, because he would never watch anyone else’s eyes the same way as he did Flint’s, and Flint would never kill him.

“I fell in love once,” he said.

Flint’s eyes narrowed. “And?”

That was Flint’s truth, wasn’t it? He fell in love, once, and it cracked like glass, into shards that cut skin and drew blood whichever way he tried to hold onto them. But it wasn’t Silver’s truth.

“And nothing,” Silver said, watching Flint’s eyes widen. “That’s it.”)

“Tell me a lie,” Flint says, and Silver closes his eyes and grits his teeth.

“I don’t care,” he says. “I. _Don’t_. Care.”

It was day on Skeleton Island when he aimed a pistol at Flint, but in his memories Skeleton Island is ever dark. In his dreams Flint sits before him, a lantern between them and a shovel in the ground, and Flint is talking about Thomas, talking about love, trees all around. Then the trees are leaning in and Flint is leaning in and Silver has a gun in his hand and the muzzle of the gun is pressed right up against Flint’s chest, and Silver is talking about Madi, talking about love, and it never ends. Silver wakes up and it never ends.

He opens his eyes.

The hill again, but this time under moonlight. No swords. Just them. Just Flint and Silver.

The moon is so bright and close it hurts Silver’s lungs.

Just a week ago Madi came up here and finally talked to him, finally reached out and touched his hand. Now Flint is here. It’s been a whole year, and Flint appears on the Maroon Island with Thomas Hamilton in tow, and what can Silver do but run away? Run here, to the place where he had been allowed to make mistakes, where every mistake had brought Flint stepping towards him instead of away?

“I did the right thing, because she is alive, and _you_ are alive, and you have him again,” Silver says, and it’s not the moon, it’s Flint. It’s a gasping, floundering feeling inside him, his lungs screaming, because Flint is so close. “I did the right thing.”

“Is that a lie, too?” Flint asks, and his face is gentler than the moon, paler and more perfect. His shirt is stupidly white, too, and luminous in the night.

“Don’t ask me,” Silver says, looking down at the grass, because he cannot bear to look at Flint’s face: such gentleness is not for him. “I couldn’t tell you.”

“That’s progress,” Flint says. “You do care, and you’re not as sure as you were before.”

What is it about Flint that makes Silver’s body feel like a courtyard open to the rain? Before he met Flint, he was a closed, suffocating cellar, dust-filled and secret, but containing nothing valuable. Every moment since meeting Flint has been a slow excavation, an unearthing, all the parts of him turned upwards and out to face the sky. Every moment since meeting Flint has been progress.

Except for the past year, the darkness swallowing him again in Flint’s absence.

“Tell me you’re happy,” Silver says.

“I am,” Flint says, and Silver still doesn’t look at Flint, doesn’t want to know how Flint’s face wears happiness, because that is not for him either.

“Why did you come here then?” Silver asks. “If you’re happy. I don’t know if I did the right thing, but if you’re happy, what do you need from me? An apology? Some kind of reprisal for what I did? Or are you here so you can see for yourself how tormented I’ve been over it?”

“I need this thing between us to _end_.”

“What are you talking about? It _ended_. It ended when I tried to kill you on Skeleton Island. It ended when I took you to Savannah and left you there, behind the locked gates of a plantation. It ended, and I don’t understand what you’re doing here or what you’re looking for.”

“It hasn’t ended,” Flint says. “It hasn’t ended and you know it. I had to come here. I had to know how we’re really supposed to end. They might make us the monsters in their stories, Silver, but I will not allow us to be the villains in each other’s eyes. I will not permit it. The narrative cannot end there.”

“This isn’t a fucking _story_ , Flint,” Silver says. “It’s just what it is, and it’s over. I did what I did, and now I have to live with it, and you can go wherever you want and you can be _happy_ with Thomas, and you can forget what happened here, you can forget—”

“What happened here?” Flint asks. “On this cliff?”

“Nothing,” Silver says. “You taught me to fight and not die. That’s all.”

“That’s all,” Flint repeats. “Nothing else.”

“Nothing else,” Silver says, but even as he says it, it hurts him. It burns. All of him burns, his throat and his eyes and his hands. He is lying and lies have always been easy, but it’s not easy now. He knows what the truth is, has felt it sear his skin for the past year, a cruel brand that has left him raw and marked and different.

Flint inhales, standing taller, his posture proud and aggressive. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t have come here searching for some sort of epilogue. Maybe it’s not what I think it is, maybe I was always in a story that you weren’t truly a part of. But _maybe_ , John Silver, you can admit to yourself that you are still in the same story as I am, and that it fucking _means_ something.”

“What does it mean, then?” Silver says.

“It means,” Flint starts, and stops, his fingers twitching, no longer so confident. He glances off to the side, at the deep and poison-black cauldron of the sea. “It means that when I was in the dark, you _found_ me there, and you were made of light and fire. And I—” He breaks off, looking back at Silver with desperate eyes.

“That was you,” Silver says. “The light and fire. It was you. Not me.”

“In the cage,” Flint says, shaking his head. His voice is rough-hewn wood. “You were like a torch. The only torch I could see.”

Silver’s heart pitches ungracefully off the edge of the outcrop, plummeting awkward and painful. He has always thought of it—his heart—as a tar-black thing, but he supposes that tar is what makes torches burn, after all. And his heart, tarrier than others, burns steady and long. It has been burning for some time now, though he does not know when it was kindled. Even doused in water, in rain and sea and tears, it cannot be extinguished.

“I’ve been sitting here every day for the past year,” he confesses, his throat dry.

Flint stares at him, apparently stunned by this revelation. “And yet, you say, nothing happened here on this cliff.”

The smallest of smiles curls into Silver’s mouth like a slice of fruit; it is sweet and bitter at the same time, something plucked and tasted before it was ripe. “You caught my lie.” 

“So you do… You _do_.” Flint’s hand touches his cheek, and Silver would ask _I do what?_ , but he knows the answer. The touch of Flint’s hand is so radiantly warm that it ought to be visible, a moon-white glow of sensation on Silver’s face.

He sways forward on his crutch, leans up and into that touch, shuts his eyes so that the real moon in the night sky is eclipsed by the full, bright feeling of Flint’s hand cradling his cheek. His lips find Flint’s. It is slow at first, the delicate press of mouths that have not yet learnt how they fit together, but then Flint’s arms are around him and Flint is a waterfall of heat; they kiss like one of them is pouring into the other, like they are two parts of a continuous thing meeting in a deafening roar, a river crashing down into its own embrace. 

Silver is just beginning to feel weak with the force of it, with the powerful insistence of Flint’s body against his, when Flint pulls back and murmurs, rubbing Silver’s bottom lip, “Sit down on the grass.”

He helps Silver so that Silver is sitting with his back against the rock, crutch abandoned on the ground, and he straddles Silver. It’s even more overwhelming now that Flint’s weight is pinning Silver’s thighs down, and _Jesus_ , Flint is so fucking hard, his cock grinding against Silver’s through fabric as they carry on kissing, his hips rolling down and relentless, his mouth wicked and biting. The rock is digging into Silver’s back but he doesn’t give a damn. Flint’s hands are in his shirt, under his shirt, hot and curious on his stomach, on his chest, rewriting him with every touch, revising every lie into a truth, a single truth. _I want you, I want you, I want you._

Flint swings himself over to one side and frees Silver from his weight momentarily so that he can remove his trousers. Silver takes the opportunity to get rid of his own. Their shirts too fall discarded on the grass, and then Flint is pushing Silver’s thighs apart so he can kneel between them, and his hand brushes lazily over the head of Silver’s cock, teasing and careful.

Silver lets himself relax into the rock behind him as he looks at Flint, drinks in the sight of him, the freckles flung like flecks of paint across the slopes of his shoulders, his breathtaking thighs, enormous between Silver’s own, like snow-hushed hills. The slight plush paunch of his belly, the rise and jut of his cock.

“You’re so beautiful,” Silver says, gripping Flint’s cock and savouring the pulse of it in his hand, the gorgeous heaviness of it like a bolt of silk. “ _Fuck_ , you’d feel so amazing inside me.” 

“Pity we don’t have any oil,” Flint says, winding Silver’s curls around his fingers and tugging a little, enough that Silver feels the sting.

“I want your fingers,” Silver says, jerking his hips upwards into Flint’s disobliging hand. “Please, Captain, just—just two of them. Please.”

“I like hearing you beg.” Flint stops hovering his hand above Silver’s cock. He sits back, holding Silver’s thighs as he stretches his legs beneath them. Then his hand is on Silver’s chin, his finger at the corner of Silver’s mouth, and Silver swirls his tongue over the pad of it, laves it up and down. “Fuck, yes, that’s it, suck my finger into your mouth. Oh _God_ , yes.” Flint slips another finger inside Silver’s mouth, and Silver moans, feeling the two fingers thrusting between his lips, over his tongue. “Good boy,” Flint says, and Silver shudders, a languid kind of pleasure trickling down his spine like morning sunlight through a window. He wants to hear that again. He wants to hear Flint call him good again.

Flint withdraws his fingers from Silver’s mouth, and he drops his hand, tapping the two wet fingers on Silver’s hole. Silver whines, hips jumping, and Flint smooths a reassuring hand along the sensitive skin on his inner thigh, sending shivers all through him. “Look at you,” Flint says, a shade of awe in his voice that makes Silver feel half-drowsy with pleasure, “you want me so much, how could you have ever pretended otherwise? You’re so greedy for me to do everything to you, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Silver says, his thigh trembling under Flint’s hand. “Yes, _Jesus Christ_ , yes.”

Flint’s fingers draw circles around Silver’s hole and Silver’s eyes roll back; he’s ripping fistfuls of grass from the ground but he barely knows that he’s doing it. And then finally, finally, one of Flint’s fingers sinks into him, opens him up, and he clutches Flint’s face to his and sighs into the kiss.

“Tell _me_ a lie,” Silver implores, as Flint’s finger works deeper into him, in and out and in again.

“You’re the liar, not me,” Flint breathes, but then considers, his finger stroking cleverly inside Silver and eliciting more shivers. “You don’t matter to me. Not a whit. You’ve never mattered to me.”

Silver groans; he doesn’t know why, but those words make him feel so fucking good. A savage kind of good, the kind of good that shrieks and howls in the centre of him. Flint’s eyes are so intense that Silver cannot escape from them, from the truth of them. He never mattered to anyone, and then there was Flint, and the crew, and he _mattered_. There was meaning. He had meaning.

And he threw it all away. He shouldn’t matter to Flint. Not anymore. But he still does, and it’s the kind of mercy he doesn’t deserve, but he doesn’t want to question it. He just wants to bask in it. 

He grasps Flint’s hair, feels Flint slide another finger into him. Flint’s fingers fuck him so well, curling sharply within him and rubbing firm and deep; even with just two fingers inside him Silver feels submerged in waves that cascade over him, making it impossible to breathe. He can’t imagine what it would be like to split himself open on Flint’s cock.

“You’re taking it so wonderfully,” Flint says, sweeping a hand through his hair, nails scratching into his scalp. “God, you’re so tight, you feel so good around my fingers. You’d be just perfect around my cock.”

Panting, Silver kisses Flint, chases Flint’s tongue and sucks the tip of it into his own mouth. He clenches around Flint’s fingers, feels his hole quivering and anxious for more. “ _Ah_ , Flint, harder, please, don’t stop.”

“Tell me a lie first,” Flint says, voice soft as his short hair feels in Silver’s hand.

“I don’t love you,” Silver says, the words crumbling from him as he looks at Flint, the same way butter melts in the sun. Flint’s startled mouth curves, lopsided and lovely. His eyes are tender and moonlit-fond, and Silver’s thumb finds the dip in Flint’s cheek, and _oh_ , this is what happiness looks like on Flint’s face. It can be meant for Silver after all. His thumb belongs right there in Flint’s dimple, see.

He ducks his head into the crook of Flint’s neck and kisses it intently as Flint’s fingers press more ruthlessly into him, and Flint’s hand wraps around his cock, pumping quick and generous.

“Touch me,” Flint demands, and Silver does, caressing the head of Flint’s cock with his thumb and gathering the slick wetness from the slit before matching Flint’s rhythm, his hand twisting and squeezing up and down the thick shaft of Flint’s cock.

He’s close now, listening to the hitches in Flint’s breath, the whimpers that Flint fails to swallow, feeling each movement of Flint’s fingers within him flaring heat, each delicious slide of Flint’s hand on his cock. 

The truth isn’t that he _wants_ Flint. The truth is that he loves Flint, and that is a fact that lends shape and reason and purpose to an otherwise meaningless and dissonant series of events. And every spark of pleasure drives Silver wild and sad and angry with the thought that this will never be recorded in any book, that it will never be known how he and Flint loved each other, but he hopes that if he kisses Flint hard enough, that if he claws red into Flint’s back and sucks purple into Flint’s skin, something will blaze fierce enough to find its way into a sentence somewhere one day, even if most people will not perceive its presence. Someone will know. Someone has to know that these two monsters parted the darkness for each other just as Moses parted the Red Sea, that they met each other in the middle of the path of light they had created, and loved each other there.

“Yes, God, _yes_ , Silver, that’s it, that’s it. My good boy, are you going to come for me? Will you come with me?”

And on that cliff, on that cliff where Flint tried to teach Silver everything he knew so that Silver would not die in battle, on that cliff where they danced a kind of dance that would only be danced by them and no one else before or since, on that cliff where Silver realised he had fallen in love with the colour of Flint’s eyes and with Flint himself, on that cliff where he sat every day for a year, waiting for the people he loved though he did not know if the waiting would ever end—

On that cliff, Silver comes, biting off his cry into Flint’s shoulder at the same time as he feels the warm throb of Flint’s cock in his hand, Flint’s seed splattering his cupped palm, and he leans back, heedless of his shoulderblades hitting the tough rock behind, as he licks the moonlight dripping from his fingers, watching through half-lidded eyes the affection shining clear on Flint’s face, and the story they’re in ends at last in a manner they can both be satisfied with, or, perhaps, merely turns the page to a new chapter.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are really appreciated! <3 Come find me on [tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com) where I'm still pretty stuck on those cliffs sometimes.


End file.
